Weekly Brief, 6 June 2022

This week's highlights

ELIXIR All Hands event kick-off!

We hope that you're as excited as we are to delve into the programme of the ELIXIR All Hands 2022! With over 300 people registered and a huge diversity of workshops and talks, we're sure it's going to be a fantastic event.
Please use #ELIXIR22 if you're sharing outputs of the event on social media, we look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam!

All Hands 2022 website

BioHackathon registration opens

7-11 November 2022 | Campus des Berges des Seine, Paris, France

The BioHackathon Europe brings together bioinformaticians from around the world offering an intense week of hacking on diverse and exciting projects. This year, there are 35 accepted projects and 60 funded project leads and invited attendees. All projects can be found on the BioHackathon website.

More information and registration

Recommended reads

Selection analysis identifies clusters of unusual mutational changes in Omicron lineage BA.1 that likely impact Spike function


ELIXIR-CONVERGE & BY-COVID

Among the 30 nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions in the Omicron S-gene are 13 that have only rarely been seen in other SARS-CoV-2 sequences. These mutations cluster within three functionally important regions of the S-gene at sites that will likely impact interactions between subunits of the Spike trimer and the predisposition of subunits to shift from down to up configurations, interactions of Spike with ACE2 receptors, and the priming of Spike for membrane fusion. Given the evident epidemic growth advantages of Omicron, it is crucial to determine both how such complex and highly adaptive mutation constellations were assembled within the Omicron S-gene.

Read more

ELIXIR biovalidator for semantic validation of life science metadata



EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR & ELIXIR-BE

To advance biomedical research, increasingly large amounts of complex data need to be discovered and integrated. This requires syntactic and semantic validation to ensure shared understanding of relevant entities. This article describes the ELIXIR biovalidator, which extends the syntactic validation of the widely used AJV library with ontology-based validation of JSON documents.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

The SIB Profile 2022 is out!

The latest activity report features the infrastructure's remarkable outputs and highlights from the community and solutions put in place to:

  • accelerate the monitoring of epidemics in Switzerland
  • support Open Science
  • enable personalized health research

SIB Profile 2022: Data scientists for life

Discover SIB in five benefits for society

Explore SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics's new webpage to find out concrete examples of how the life science infrastructure and data science expertise at the institute contribute to a better world and a stronger Switzerland.

Explore the webpage

Meet SIBs new Joint Executive Director

"SIB's data science expertise is key to the digital transformation in biology and medicine."

Christophe Dessimoz, the new Joint Executive Director of SIB, is an Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne with an international aura in comparative genomics and Big Data analysis.

Read more

Call open: ELIXIR-UK applications for Data Steward Training Fellowship 2022-2023 cohort

Deadline: 10 July 2022

The ELIXIR-UK DaSH Fellowship aims to embed Research Data Management (RDM) know-how into UK universities and institutes. Data Steward Fellows will create training materials and deliver local training.

More information
Informative webinar on June 9

Updates from Communities

Call for two co-leads

Deadline: 21 July 2022

The ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics (emerging Microbiome) Community is looking for two co-leads to join Rob Finn to lead this Community. The Community is opening a self-nomination process. Candidates should submit a short statement of their background and what they believe they will bring to the role.
A big thank you goes to Nils P Willassen who has been leading the Community together with Rob for the last years.

For any questions or nominations, please contact Katharina Heil
More information

Food & Nutrition Community first workshop series

The Community is currently organising its first workshop series, as part of its Implementation Study. On 1 and 2 September 2022, three workshops will be organised, focusing on metadata (phenotype database), microbiome data (MGNIFY) and Metabolomics data (Metabolights).

If you have human data/studies with food intake, microbiome, and metabolomics data, please reach out to Jildau Bouwan by 15 June 2022.

Updates from Other Initiatives

NuGo Week

19 August - 1 September 2022 | Tarragona, Spain

A three and a half days annual conference, organised by the Nutrigenomics Research Group of the University Rovira I Virgili and NuGO. Submit your abstract for oral presentation by 16 June 2022, and poster by 1 July 2022.

More information

Upcoming ELIXIR events & webinars

ELIXIR Training Courses & Webinars

The ELIXIR TeSS portal has a variety of interesting events and courses organised by the ELIXIR Nodes. For more, visit TeSS portal

First Step with R in Life Sciences

8-9 June 2022 | Lausanne, Switzerland

Q&A webinar: 2nd cohort application of ELIXIR-UK DaSH Fellowship
9 June 2022 | 14:00 BST | Online

Functional exploration of genetic variants in cardiac diseases

14-15 June 2022 | Lyon, France | Apply by 1 May

ELIXIR Webinar: ELIXIR Operations
16 June 2022 | 15:00 CEST | Virtual

Checking for preprint and article updates
16 June 2022 | 16:00 CEST | Virtual

Research Data Management and Data Management Plan

23-24 June 2022 | Lausanne, Switzerland

Summer school on genetic epidemiology

29 June - 2 July 2022 | Davos, Switzerland

Training course on facilitation and moderation skills

7-8 July 2022 | Hague, Netherlands

ELIXIR Events and Conference

ELIXIR All Hands meeting 2022

7-10 June 2022 | Amsterdam, Netherlands

BY-COVID: National-level experiences of pathogen-related data sharing in pandemic times and beyond

23 June 2022 | 13-15:00 CET | Online

BioHackathon Europe

7-11 November 2022 | Paris, France

Job vacancies

 

All vacancies are also published on the ELIXIR website (also including those from industry). If you need our help communicating your new open positions, you can submit a job advertisement and it will automatically appear on our newsletters. Go to our vacancy page to submit a job
 

Scientific Relations Manager (50-60%)

Institut Suisse de Bioinformatique

Bioinformatician / software developer

Masaryk University and FNUSA-ICRC

DevOps System Administrator

University of Bergen